Issue Three

Spring 2012

Computer Generated

There is no in the beginning,only a name, a first entry, written in some hamlet, barely a place, cluster of small walls.A Challacombe, some Smisby, a Gringley-on-the-Hill.What happened there? What happens everywhere.Mild muttering men repairbroken roofs in inconvenient winds,pray for better weather, love women. Places of small magics,grandfatherly wishes.

By chance, there is a record.By same, by grace, there is a scrawl of the clerking cleric, a day of marriage noted, two whose lives were walking distances between the fields.Faint legible marks, but enough.There will be your own in archaic and ornate spelling, scribbled to the best guess of a man of cloth listening hard. A Redfern or Redfan of Smisby,Antcliff or Ancliff of Gringley,some Rodd or Ridd of Challacombe.

Our old illiterates, they knew.They knew amongst the first plants of the season, the broad or twisting blades of oat and barley. They knew amongstthe piled peat, the salted.But nothing of the small vastness of computers; no inkling.Apart perhaps from the rumouredmind of God, omniscient to the last ant or stillborn child.They spoke before the age of correct spelling, when wordswalked as the vicars said, once written, forever fixed.And then foxed. Fixed for the darting fingers of the databases, the indexes of the all-knowing search engine box.Guess as the vicar guessed andhear that day's ancestral voice, near the kissing, fields ago.Guess as the vicar guessed and hear the only voice of Genesis.In the beginning was that word.